Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

While the Post is also a local newspaper, it has specialized in national politics, developing a reputation as one of America’s leading political journalism institutions, particularly since its coverage of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. It has won more than 50 Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other prestigious journalism awards since then. The Post has also, however, periodically received criticism for not emphasizing its local coverage enough, and for emphasizing it too much.

In 2014, The Post announced a partnership with The New York Times and Mozilla to create tools to improve online commenting systems. The program was funded by a $3.89 million grant from the Knight Foundation.

In 2009, the Post launched Story Lab, a blog that experiments with new narrative forms in its reporting and presentation.

The Post’s breaking-news blogging and aggregation initiative, blogPOST, came under fire in 2012 when one of its bloggers resigned after being caught plagiarizing. The site was accused of pushing its young reporters too hard to blog quickly without enough guidance.

The Post launched a metered pay plan in June 2013, with free access for print subscribers as well as students, educators, and government and military employees. Digital subscriptions were set at $9.99 and $14.99 per month. In 2014, it expanded free access to its website and apps to subscribers of more than 100 local newspapers with which it partnered, including Digital First’s papers and the Dallas Morning News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Before 2013, the Post had been one of the most prominent American newspapers to forgo an online paywall, with its executives repeatedly saying they had no plans to launch a paywall for their online content.

The paper’s lack of a paywall has at times been controversial: Former editor Marcus Brauchli reportedly clashed with publisher Katharine Weymouth over what he saw as insufficient revenue generation from the Post’s website, and critics had called for the Post to adopt a paid-content approach.

Salons scandal

In 2009, Post officials circulated plans to offer lobbyists exclusive off-the-record meetings, or “salons,” with government officials and Post reporters and editors for a cost of up to $250,000. The meetings were to be held at the home of Post publisher Katharine Weymouth. The plans were canceled soon after Politico reported on them.

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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit online news organization based in Austin, Texas, that focuses on political and civic issues. The site was founded in 2009 by venture capitalist John Thornton and former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith. Thornton raised $4 million in startup funds for the site, including $1 million of his own money…

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